Precepts of Christ come nowhere near “the morality of amorous love of KRSNA devotees?

krsna · April 10, 2007

Srila Sarasvati Thakura and Prof. Suthers

Prof. Suthers: Your Holiness seems to have taken a biased view in saying that the good moral precepts of Christ come nowhere near “the morality of amorous love of the devotees of Krishna.”

Srila Sarasvati Thakura: Certainly not. We claim to be greater and better Christians than Westerners. Our judgement is not restricted only to secular morality. The morality of the object of spiritual love transcends the supra-natural morality, which again surpasses secular morality. If Christian morality is perfected thereby, then it may be said to receive proper nourishment. To a pure soul that remains situated on that transcendentally moral plane of love, the secular moralities appear reduced to the smallness of pygmies. But there is not found any feeling of apathy, nor attachment towards these secular moralities. On the other hand, all moralities wait like maids behind the spiritual moralities to become glorified, being permitted to serve the Lord of transcendental Love. The character of a culturist of spiritual love is never devoid of morality. One hostile to morality or fallen from it can never be a spiritual man. In the blaze of the teaching of Sri Caitanya Deva’s ideal, it has been propagated that dissoluteness is not devotion. Its palpable evidence is found when we reflect on the character of Sri Caitanya Deva or the followers at His Heel. The people of the realm of the secular morality concerned with the worldly enjoyments and their renunciation will not be able to grasp in their tiniest brains how fostered by the climax of morality and how adored in the highest degree by all the morality of the universe are the Amorous Sports of Krishna, so much glorified by the noble clan of such high personages of strictly continent character as the devotees of Sri Caitanya Deva like Sri Rupa, Sri Sanatana, Sri Raghunatha Dasa, Sri Raghunatha Bhatta, Sri Gopala Bhatta, etc.

Prof. Suthers: How can your Holiness’s statements be reconciled with the descriptions that are found about Krishna’s amorous sports?

Srila Sarasvati Thakura: Krishna’s Amorous Sports are not temporal like the lustful sports of dramatic heroes and heroines like Romeo-Juliet or even ideal spouses. Lust as prevalent in this world is only a mental passion, but the lust of the transcendental region has its own form. Here lust is always goaded by the enemy (one of the six passions); whereas in the transcendental region of Krishna, the loveliness of the spiritual Body of Krishna ever drives the Lust for Krishna, which takes form as sublimated love or the desire to gratify the immaculate senses of Krishna. The conductor of the worldly lust is the enemy (passion), and the conductor of love is Krishna. It is the Amorous Sports of Krishna that have appropriateness; but there is no such consistency in the lust born of the body and mind of jiva (creature). Krishna’s Amorous Sports are not to be called indecency, because it is Krishna Who is the only one unrivalled Enjoyer, Embodiment of the Real Truth and the Spiritual Despot.

Prof. Suthers: I cannot fully appreciate this; please let me understand it a little more clearly.

Srila Sarasvati Thakura: Suppose there are some angles, two right angles, four right angles, etc. There is the contracted character of a corner in the acute, obtuse or right angle. But in the two right angles called the straight angle, even though called an angle, there is no contractedness or want of straightness, as in the case with angles in general. Such is the case with the Autocrat Krishna. There is no want or contractedness or despicable character or indecency in the perfect Entity Krishna, like the circle of 360 degrees, though the communities of enjoyers or renouncers, championing morality or immorality, may, due to the meagreness of their intellect, wrongly regard the lustfulness of Krishna, the result of His despotism which is only His, as vulgar like that of common men and other creatures.

Professor Suthers: The Gita has admitted the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul. What does your Vaisnava philosophy say about this?

Srila Sarasvati Thakura: The Gita is not separate from the Vaisnava philosophy. In the Srimad-Bhagavatam has been fully revealed the true import of the doctrine, viz., that of changes of births for the soul. Christianity has disregarded the principle of change of births on the alleged ground that if it is accepted, men will not restrain their sinful propensities, rather they will indulge in vices at their sweet will in their present life, on the expectation that they will be able to make good their sins, guilts, and wrong doing of this life in the course of the following ones. But the Srimad-Bhagavatam has crowned the principle with its true significance, by means of a much fuller scientific and philosophical meaning, by giving the instruction about the urgent necessity for ardently taking up and culturing devotion to God even while the human life, not easily available in the after-lives, is at our disposal, without spending a single moment thereof in other useless pursuits. If we do not accept the doctrine of transmigration of the soul and adopt the instruction of the Srimad-Bhagavatam, we shall not be able to get over the all-devouring disaster of regarding matter as the sole object of our concern, which has kept its mouth wide open.

Though most of the Christians do not admit transmigration, yet many intellectual giants of the Christian world have shown several instances of their acceptance of the doctrine. Even in the Bible we find “And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying,-’Master, who had committed the sin? This man or his parents, that he was born blind?’” [st. John 9, 1-2] It is seen that even some Christian Fathers clearly gave instructions about transmigration.

Origen said: “Is it not more in conformity with reason that every soul for certain mysterious reasons is introduced into a body and introduced according to its deserts and former actions?” [ Origen contra celscea, I xxxii] “I am sure that I, such as you see me here, have lived a thousand times, and I have to come again another thousand times” says Goethe.

What the Greeks called ‘Metempsychosis’ or what is ‘Transmigration’ in the English language, was at one time, more or less, admitted in ancient Greece, Egypt, and many places in the west. Some say that the apostles of Christ the Great, failing to reconcile their previous and subsequent conclusions with the doctrine of transmigration, were compelled to discard it. Yet no rationalist among the Christians has been able to refute the doctrine on the basis of sound reasoning; on the other hand, most of them have had to admit it even. Heredotus, Pindar, Plato, etc. have all accepted it. Huxley, the illustrious scientist of the nineteenth century, has written in his religious work, Evolution and Ethics: “None but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity, like the doctrine of evolution itself, viz., that of transmigration which has its root in the world of reality, and it may claim such support as the great argument of ‘analogy’ is capable of supplying.”

Professor Lutoloski has said, “I cannot give up my conviction of a previous existence on earth before my birth, and I have the certainty to be born again after my death, until I have assimilated all human experiences, having been many times male and female, wealthy and poor, free and enslaved, generally having experienced all conditions of human existence.” But such transmigration theories of the empiricists of the west or those of the western philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries like Franciscus Mercurius Helmont, Leichtenburg, Lessing, Herder, Schopenhauer, etc. or of Jalaluddin Rumi of the Sufi sect of Persia, or of the Theosophists, or of the Indian Nyaya philosophy under the aphorism: ” From the desire for the mother’s breast milk due to the habit of the previous life,” or of the Buddhistic doctrine of annihilation in matter-these are assailable by various hostile reasonings and having their origin in inductive concepts are incomplete and imperfect. But the conclusion in this respect of the Srimad-Bhagavatam is fully flawless and significant. The Vaisnava philosophy having shown the royal road to the acquirement of the highest blessedness even in the present life, there is no need of waiting for future lives. As such, the Vaisnava philosophy is thoroughly aloof from all wrangling full of useless riddles over the doctrine of transmigration.

>>> Ref. VedaBase => RoV 13: Scholars and Indologists

April 10, 2007

<font face="monotype corsiva" color="red" size=5><B>Srila Sarasvati Thakura: Krishna’s Amorous Sports are not temporal like the lustful sports of dramatic heroes and heroines like Romeo-Juliet or even ideal spouses. Lust as prevalent in this world is only a mental passion, but the lust of the transcendental region has its own form. Here lust is always goaded by the enemy (one of the six passions); whereas in the transcendental region of Krishna, the loveliness of the spiritual Body of Krishna ever drives the Lust for Krishna, which takes form as sublimated love or the desire to gratify the immaculate senses of Krishna. </font></B>